The prior art in the field of the invention has been disclosed for example in patent publications U.S. Pat. No. 5,268,011, US2007137154, WO2013163379, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,771,430, 3,849,095 and 4,557,740.
Louvered separators are used especially to separate water in the form of droplets from an air flow. Particularly in ships, oil platforms and similar marine conditions, the combustion air taken for engines and the fresh air taken for air conditioning devices contains so much water that, as such, it would quickly destroy the devices. Thus, the water must be removed from the air flow.
Due to large amounts of air, any filtering fabrics or other jackets may not be considered because of high pressure losses. Thus, the separation of water is conducted in vertical louvers in which a large number of identical slats form, in the spaces between the slots, tortuous channels in which the droplets, as they are heavier than air, are separated due to the centrifugal force onto the outer edges of the channels and into the troughs provided therein, while the dry air flow moves past the troughs and through the louver.
However, there are some drawbacks in the prior art. The water separating profiles do not work flawlessly because the water-collecting troughs therein give rise to rough vortices within the air flow which mix the air flow and thus cause significant pressure losses. The vortical motion of the flow also produces an uncontrolled flow of the droplets. Thus, a large amount of the water droplets are able to pass through the water separator, unless the separating channels are made long and extremely staged in such a way that a sufficient total separating capacity will be reached, which again leads to significant pressure losses. Thus, in the known water separators the separating capacity and pressure losses are both of an unsatisfactory level.